In this blog post, I would like to think about why we feel lonely even when we are with others and the nature of loneliness in communication.
In this blog, I would like to talk about loneliness. One day, I was lying on the sofa reading a book alone in my house, and suddenly felt lonely. The feeling of loneliness comes like this, out of the blue. Loneliness is not only felt when you are alone, but also when you are with someone else. You may have felt the limits of communication when you thought that the other person did not truly understand you. Loneliness hides deep in your heart and then reveals itself regardless of your will.
Gabriel García Márquez deals with the idea of solitude, which is something that all human beings inevitably experience, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The people of the Macondo family feel their own solitude in the great cycle of time and struggle to overcome it. Here, solitude acts as a fundamental problem of human existence.
I would like to understand Virginia Woolf’s work “Mrs. Dalloway” from the perspective that such notions of solitude are closely connected to human life. “Mrs. Dalloway” is about what happens on a single day in June 1923. The story begins when the main character, Mrs. Dalloway, goes out to buy flowers to prepare for the party, and ends when the party ends in the evening. During this day, the stories of Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Warren Smith, and Lucrecia Warren Smith intersect, and the author leads the novel along the flow of their consciousness.
Virginia Woolf believed that the existing narrative method of expressing external appearances could not fully represent the inner lives of characters. She preferred a method of listing and crossing out the impressions of characters’ reactions to events or scenes, rather than traditional realism, because she believed that this method was more suitable for expressing characters. By showing the flow of characters’ consciousness in this way, readers can gain deeper insight into their inner lives. And the common element found in this process is “loneliness.” Let’s take a look at the aspects of loneliness revealed in each character.
Septimus is a soldier who fought in the war and witnessed the death of his friend Evans during the war. He returns to London safely, but is deeply scarred mentally. He sees visions of Evans, and the visual and auditory stimuli around him are amplified and torment him. He believes that the world is sending him signals and that he must take on the role of the savior. His wife, Lucrecia, tries to bring him back to reality, but Septimus sees her efforts as interference and believes that he is destined to remain isolated forever. He has foreseen the primal solitude of man in the midst of war.
Septimus’ wife, Lucrezia, met and married Septimus during the war and came to London with him. She loves Septimus, but cannot understand what he is saying. Septimus predicts that he will commit suicide, and she cannot tell anyone about it. Her life, which was happy until recently, is being shaken to the core. She finds it difficult to admit to herself that he is thinking of committing suicide, and she is afraid that it might be true. In this situation, she thinks that love makes people lonely.
Mrs. Dalloway was in love with Peter Walsh when she was young, but she left him and married Richard Dalloway. She is in her middle age and loves her husband and thinks that she has a relatively happy family, but she still feels lonely in the middle of her life. She likes to throw parties to try to connect with other people, but her husband thinks it is childish. She is not satisfied with her relationship with her daughter either. She is uncomfortable with her daughter’s close relationship with her tutor and her religious devotion.
This sense of loneliness is not only related to her relationships with others, but also to her own situation. The description of her bed getting smaller and smaller in the novel symbolizes the shrinking of her life. She is now of an age where she can no longer conceive life, which is a death to her. She feels that a part of her life is disappearing, and she is left alone in the midst of it.
The characters’ sense of loneliness stems from two reasons. The first cause is the uniqueness of each individual’s consciousness. Virginia Woolf shows how each character perceives the same event differently. Even though they are going through the same event, the characters’ interpretations are different. This suggests that each individual’s consciousness is independent and individual.
The second cause is a lack of understanding of others. Virginia Woolf believes that a character cannot be defined by his or her appearance alone. The human mind is very complex, and it is full of various emotions and thoughts. We often judge others by their external appearance, which results in missing the essence of the person.
Is there any way to escape this loneliness? In the novel, empathy is presented as a possibility to overcome loneliness. Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway have never met each other, and they are different in age, gender, and background. However, Mrs. Dalloway, who heard the news of Septimus’ suicide, feels that she has upheld an important value through his death. By resisting oppression and choosing death, Septimus has achieved complete communication with Mrs. Dalloway, even if only for a moment.
Ultimately, we may not be able to overcome loneliness completely, but we can face it in the process of acknowledging and accepting it. Understanding our own solitude and acknowledging the solitude of others may be our only response to solitude. Solitude is an essential problem of human nature that we cannot avoid, but rather than avoiding it, we need to accept it as a part of life. This attitude will make us stronger in the face of solitude.
